Artist's Statement

Painting
on Wings of Song

Like many children, I loved to illustrate the stories
and legends I read during my childhood.
When studying at Glasgow School of Art in my early 20s, illustration
more than landscape or life painting absorbed my attention. Since then, I have
illustrated poems, folk tales, images of war, and studied the art of Indian and
Moghul miniature painting as well as the narrative paintings of Japanese and
Chinese artists.

And so, when I took up intensive piano studies, not
surprisingly, I was inspired to illustrate the works I played. While learning
to play The Skylark by Glinka-Balakirev, I was struck by the concordance I
perceived between the composer’s score and the flight of the skylark – a bird
with exquisite song as well as the ability to soar and circle from a nest on
the ground to the upper regions of the sky around the sun. The skylark’s song
has inspired poets and musicians and I eagerly studied their poetry and music.
I investigated descriptions and pictures from nature studies, showing the
lark’s flightpath, take off and landing, as well as the annual song and nesting
cycles. I was greatly helped in this search by my sister in law, Miranda
Tufnell, who supplied
many beautiful photos of the English countryside where larks might lie and make
their nests.

The next series of paintings illustrates the Bach
compositions I was studying together with material taken from books on Bach’s
extraordinary life. I incorporated images of the magnificent towns and
cathedrals and organs where he played. I placed the images I collected on a
wall near my worktable and opposite the bed where I sleep. I pinned and
unpinned the images until I found the right sequence for my story. My ‘walls’
must be compositionally right and pleasing since I live with them for 3-4
months; they are the first images to meet my dreams as they slip away into the
light of day. I have followed the same order when illustrating
Mendelssohn-Liszt’s On Wings of Song and Schubert-Liszt’s Du Bist
die Ruh. It’s become my method. I love the research work into the
composers’ lives and compositions, and the worlds in which they lived, the
imagery selection for the ‘wall’, as well as the painting process that
parallels my daily piano practice.

As an illustrator, I am used to working with ink,
gouache, acrylic, watercolor and pencil. I started with this mix of materials
but, early on in the Skylark series, I discovered the translucence, brilliance
and layering afforded by ink alone. Unlike acrylics and oils, ink pigments do not mix well. Purity of color comes straight from the bottle, often mixed with clear water washes. With ink, I can build up many layers,
sometimes light on dark, until a glow and enamel effect is achieved. This is a time-consuming
process. I believe that Leonardo, when using
the sfumato technique, built up over 30 layers of transparency, spending
months, even years, before completion of a work. I have always admired the intense color and glow in the paintings of the British painter, Samuel
Palmer.

Many of the piano pieces that I illustrate are
transcriptions – they are transcriptions by one composer of the works of other
composers, often piano transcriptions of songs in which an earlier composer had
set a poem to music. As is well known, Liszt transcribed many of Schubert’s
songs, and Schubert’s songs were often inspired by the poetry of writers in his
extensive artistic circle. And musicians have often created music from
paintings that they loved.

My work involves the transcription of the music I
love and play into painting.